Sara

I'm going up to my dad's tomorrow to give him his birthday gifts and visit for a bit. I have a habit of always bringing baked goods to him when I go. It's just a thing I do. I decided to make a cake. It's a cake I'm made before with great success but today everything went wrong with it. It wouldn't come out of the pans and then I couldn't make a decent crumb coat. The frosting isn't dark chocolate enough and it's just been glomped on there. In short it's an ugly cake, and I'm devastated. It probably tastes okay, but it's the sort of thing that pushes my buttons and just makes me want to scream. Factor in the fact that my friend from work has not shown up to get this desk from me, and I'm sort of super pissed.

I'm one of those people who ends up getting too emotionally involved in things. I can't help it; it's simply the way I am. When my favorite characters in television series, comics or books die, I don't just cry. I mourn them. I have stopped reading comic book series and stopped acknowledging certain episodes for the simple fact that I take it as a personal attack when something I have grown to love betrays me. In the case of my television shows and various books the writers have betrayed me. They have played with my heartstrings and then abandoned me to all the blue days. They showcase the importance of sacrifice or just the typically causalities of war, and I hate them for it.

I also emotionally invest myself in my baking. I have thrown fits and cried hot tears over cakes and breads and pastries. A cake that won't come out of the pan in one piece upsets me just as much if not more than losing a favorite character. This is not a reaction of mine that has improved with age although I do have to admit that I have stopped throwing things. I suppose I'll have the admit that as a little victory.

I can't understand why it gets to me so much when I fail at baking but a botched recipe is a death to me. It's not just the wasted money, though that does hurt because I (like everyone else I know) am on a budget so while having to go buy more flour and eggs and milk won't financially destroy me, it does knock things out of whack. It means another meal in rather than splurging to eat out or it means that I have to wait another month to buy jeans. It all adds up. I am desperately tight with my money. The last thing in the whole wide world that I want is not to be able to pay my bills. (I have a whole diatribe on capitalism, but I'll go into that another day.)

Baking disasters are like deaths to me, and I suppose that I do go right through the grieving process with them: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and finally Acceptance. With me Anger is typically replaced by overwhelming, crushing guilt.

The latest disaster of mine comes in the form of a cookie. I thought it was going to be moderately simple cookie. The recipe didn't look hard. It looked a little time consuming but nothing too horrendous. I'm making tiramisu, you see, and no one carries ladyfingers. (I take that back. I found a store that carries them, but it's not a part of Louisville that I want to be driving in because it cause a panic attack all on its own.) So I decided to make them.

My kitchen is currently covered in ladyfinger batter, my fingertips are slightly burnt and there are some very flat ladyfingers in tupperware containers. In short I want to cry and have now lost the wind beneath my wings that was carrying me forward on this recipe. And there's another thing: I have come to efffing HATE piping bags. I used to not like them but respect them. I used them every now and again with a nice buttercream for some very shoddy decorating work. We had a cordial working relationship. It was one where you say hello and smile when you pass on the stairs. Now we're at the point where if the piping bag was my co-worker, I would follow them home and tire iron their car while they slept and possible set their house on fire with them in it. (Note: There are no co-workers I have who I want to do this to.)

It started out good. There were egg whites and my stand mixer. There were peaks. I swear there were peaks. I added sugar and there were still peaks. It seemed fine. I added the egg yolks and then I added the flour. I'm not sure where everything turned into one of those disaster movies where the sky is falling. I don't know if I didn't whip the whites enough or if I folded the flour in too much, but I recognized that "Louisville, we have a problem," when I went to try and load the batter into the pastry bag.

Let's start with the fact that I should have put the parchment paper on the cookie sheets before adding the batter to the bag. In my defense I expected the batter to stay in the effing bag. The piping bag is apparently not Alcatraz in that everyone, even the blind, can escape the piping bag. The piping bag is a very shitty jailer. It basically doesn't care. The piping bag is that mother you pass in Wal-Mart who has given up. Her brood of children are yelling, running, playing with knives and basically being little jackasses yet all she does is stand there, a look on her face that says all she wants is to head for the aisle with the crappy beer, pop one open and smoke. If someone happens to steal her children while she does that, so be it. She'll miss them later but right now she's had more than she can humanly bear. This, my friends, is the piping bag only it's constantly in this state of mind. It never cares. It has always given up.

So I loaded the piping bag and doubts were already forming in my mind. It was runny. It was coming out of the tip and generally just getting everywhere. Then the parchment paper was too wide for my cookie sheets. The cookies were runny. They looked nothing like the wonderfully crisp ones in the picture on the website whose recipe I was following. They looked like puddles. Puddles of fail. The bowl of batter also looked like fail.

The whole thing was turning into the sort of hellish nightmare where you start to wish Freddy would show up in just so he can kill your ass and put you out of your misery.

I'm a tenacious person, though. I did what I always do: I continue. Oh, I got onto FB and made an update in regards to it as well as this entry I'm typing up now, but I continued cooking the little fuckers even when the piping bag decided that the top was as good a place to allow batter out of as the bottom and covered my hands in ick. I should not be surprised, though, since the piping bag is of the opinion that the entire world is its cookie sheet.

I made a number of lackluster ladyfingers. I haven't counted them, but I know it's not enough. I need to wipe down the entire kitchen to get the batter off, and I still need to make a sponge cake as a ladyfinger substitute since I don't have enough ladyfingers to complete the tiramisu, and there is no way in HELL I am trying that recipe again today.

I meant to make this funnier, but my journey towards the acceptance part of this death was a little less comical than the last kitchen disaster I experienced. Maybe one day I'll stop mourning them and berating myself. Until then I'll just keep writing it out.